Top 50 Horace Bushnell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Trust in God for great things. With your five loaves and two fishes He will show you a way to feed thousands.”

— Horace Bushnell

2. “Forgiveness is man’s deepest need and highest achievement.”

— Horace Bushnell

3. “Somewhere under the stars God has a job for you to do and nobody else can do it.”

— Horace Bushnell

4. “Every man’s life is a plan of God.”

— Horace Bushnell

5. “The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will be.”

— Horace Bushnell

6. “As long as we abide in Christ, our action is from Him, not from our own corrupt and broken nature.”

— Horace Bushnell

7. “By His trials, God means to purify us, to take away all our self-confidence, and our trust in each other, and bring us into implicit, humble trust in Himself.”

— Horace Bushnell

8. “A true Christian man is distinguished from other men, not so much by his beneficent works, as by his patience.”

— Horace Bushnell

9. “Education is only second to nature.”

— Horace Bushnell

10. “Jesus is the true manifestation of God, and He is manifested to be the regenerating power of a divine life.”

— Horace Bushnell

11. “O Thou Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, what Thou bearest in Thy blessed hands and feet I cannot bear; take it all away. Hide me in the depths of Thy suffering love, mold me to the image of Thy divine passion.”

— Horace Bushnell

12. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be. We lie here in our nest, unfledged and weak, guessing dimly at our future, and scarce believing what even now appears. But the power is in us, and that power is finally to be revealed. And what a revelation will that be!”

— Horace Bushnell

13. “Take your burdens, and troubles, and losses, and wrongs, if come they must and will, as your opportunities, knowing that God has girded you for greater things than these.”

— Horace Bushnell

14. “Be an observer of providence; for God is showing you ever, by the way in which He leads you, whither He means to lead. Study your trials, your talents, the world’s wants, and stand ready to serve God now, in whatever He brings to your hand.”

— Horace Bushnell

15. “We come, in our trust, unto God, and the moment we so embrace Him, by committing our total being and eternity to Him, we find every thing is transformed. There is life in us from God; a kind of Christ-consciousness is opened in us, testifying with the apostle, – Christ liveth in me.”

— Horace Bushnell

16. “Guilt is the very nerve of sorrow.”

— Horace Bushnell

17. “Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world, have done so much to revolutionize the earth as Man, the power of an endless life, has done since the day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it.”

— Horace Bushnell

18. “Habits are to the soul what the veins and arteries are to the blood, the courses in which it moves.”

— Horace Bushnell

19. “It is not necessary for all men to be great in action. The greatest and sublimest power is often simple patience.”

— Horace Bushnell

20. “The resurrection morning is a true sun-rising, the inbursting of a cloudless sky on all the righteous dead. They wake transfigured, at their Maker’s call, with the fashion of their countenance altered and shining like His own.”

— Horace Bushnell

21. “To understand a philosopher requires a philosopher.”

— Horace Bushnell

22. “Christ is known only by them that receive Him into their love, their faith, their deep want; known only as He is enshrined within, felt as a Divine force, breathed in the inspirations of the secret life.”

— Horace Bushnell

23. “Jesus does not drive His followers on before, as a herd of unwilling disciples, but goes before Himself, leading them into paths that He has trod, and dangers He has met, and sacrifices He has borne Himself, calling them after Him and to be only followers.”

— Horace Bushnell

24. “The peoples of the old world have their cities built for times gone by, when railroads and gunpowder were unknown. We can have cities for the new age that has come, adopted to its better conditions of use and ornament. We want, therefore, a city planning profession...”

— Horace Bushnell

25. “True conviction of sin – how difficult it is, when its appearances and modes of life are so fair, when it twines itself so cunningly about, or creeps so insidiously into, our amiable qualities, and sets off its internal disorders by so many outward charms and attractions.”

— Horace Bushnell

26. “Christ’s sacrifice stands in glorious proportions with the work to be done. Nothing else or less would suffice. It is a work supernatural, transacted in the plane of nature; and what but such a work could restore the broken order of the soul under evil?”

— Horace Bushnell

27. “Go to your duty, every man, and trust yourself to Christ; for He will give you all supply just as fast as you need it. You will have just as much power as you believe you can have. Be a Christian; throw yourself upon God’s work; and get the ability you want in it.”

— Horace Bushnell

28. “Nature has no promise for society, least of all, any remedy for sin.”

— Horace Bushnell

29. “Nothing is necessary for you in maintaining a Christian life, but just to stay by the helm, and put yourself where the power is. Come unto God, unite yourself to God, and the doing power you have is infinite.”

— Horace Bushnell

30. “Christ does not dress up a moral picture, and ask you to observe its beauty. He only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived these precepts without once conceiving their beauty.”

— Horace Bushnell

31. “However dark our lot may be, there is light enough on the other side of the cloud...”

— Horace Bushnell

32. “O, if there be any kind of life most sad, and deepest in the scale of pity, it is the dry, cold impotence of one, who has honestly set to the work of his own self-redemption.”

— Horace Bushnell

33. “A house without a roof would scarcely be a more different home, than a family unsheltered by God’s friendship, and the sense of being always rested in His providential care and guidance.”

— Horace Bushnell

34. “There never has been a great and beautiful character, which has not become so by filling well the ordinary and smaller offices appointed of God.”

— Horace Bushnell

35. “God made sin possible just as he made all lying wonders possible, but he never made it a fact, never set anything in his plan to harmonize with it. Therefore it enters the world as a forbidden fact against everything that God has ordained.”

— Horace Bushnell

36. “Christ commands you to take up His cross and follow Him, not that He may humble you, or lay some penance upon you, but that you may surrender the low self-will and the feeble pride of your sin, and ascend into the sublime patience of heavenly charity.”

— Horace Bushnell

37. “Christ is redemption only as He actually redeems and delivers our nature from sin. If He is not the law and spring of a new spirit of life, He is nothing. “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God,” as many, no more.”

— Horace Bushnell

38. “Live as with God; and, whatever be your calling, pray for the gift that will perfectly qualify you in it.”

— Horace Bushnell

39. “Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency of sin.”

— Horace Bushnell

40. “Fashionable dances as now carried on are revolting to every feeling of delicacy and propriety and are fraught with the greatest danger to millions.”

— Horace Bushnell

41. “Persecution has not crushed it, power has not beaten it back, time has not abated its force, and, what is most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its friends have not shaken its stability.”

— Horace Bushnell

42. “If you had the seeds of pestilence in your body you would not have a more active contagion that you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble.”

— Horace Bushnell

43. “We are to work after no set fashion of high endeavor; but to walk with Jesus, performing, as it were, a ministry on foot, that we may stop at the humblest matter, and prove our fidelity there.”

— Horace Bushnell

44. “Christ wants to lead men by their love, their personal love to Him, and the confidence of His personal love to them.”

— Horace Bushnell

45. “You must not go into the burial places, and look about only for the tall monuments and the titled names. It is not the starred epitaphs of the Doctors of Divinity, the Generals, the Judges, the Honourables, the Governors, or even of the village nobles called Esquires, that mark the springs of our successes and the sources of our distinctions. These are rather effects than causes; the spinning-wheels have done a great deal more than these.”

— Horace Bushnell

46. “It is only Christianity, the great bond of love and duty to God, that makes any existence valuable or even tolerable.”

— Horace Bushnell

47. “God listens for nothing so tenderly, as when His children help each other by their testimonies to His goodness and the way in which He has brought them deliverance.”

— Horace Bushnell

48. “Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency in sin. It is just that negative species of virtue which consists in not doing what is scandalously depraved and wicked. But there is no heart of holy principle in it, any more than there is in the grosser sin.”

— Horace Bushnell

49. “O, if we could tear aside the vail, and see for but one hour what it signifies to be a soul in the power of an endless life, what a revelation would it be!”

— Horace Bushnell

50. “Christianity is not so much the advent of a better doctrine as of a perfect character.”

— Horace Bushnell